Hud is a provocative picture with a shock for audiences who have been conditioned like laboratory mice to expect the customary bad-guy-is-really-good-guy reward in the last reel of a western. Paul Newman, the title-role bad guy, is a cad to the end.
But if Hud Bannon is a bounder, he is never a bore. With his good looks, appetite for hell-raising and rootless amorality, he follows his code of don't-give-a-damn with snakelike charm on the cattle ranch where he lives with his decent old father (Melvyn Douglas) and his idolizing 17-year-old nephew (Brandon de Wilde). Hud sleeps with married women, blitzes the countryside in a pink Cadillac convertible, and devils the ranch's devoted and attractive housekeeper (Patricia Neal) with whispered propositions.
When the Bannons' herd of prize cattle is infected with foot-and-mouth disease, Hud suggests that they sell the cattle "up North" and get their money, instead of accepting the Government's 50¢-on-the-dollar bounty when they are destroyed. His father sorrowfully and scornfully refuses. In a long and heartbreaking scene, uncluttered by more than a few words of dialogue, a bulldozer scoops a giant grave out of the grassland and the cattle are driven into it; then a platoon of men with shotguns and rifles stand around the edge and systematically shoot them dead. Hud, sardonically, fires the first shot.
Hud's meanness is a petty evil: most of his schemes backfire on him, and in the end he is left alone. His father is dead, the housekeeper has taken the Greyhound, and even de Wilde decides to strike out for some greener grassland where men like Douglas may still be. Unrepentant, Hud gives the nephew a parting shot of philosophy: "The world is so full of crap a man is going to get it sooner or later, whether he is careful or not." Then Hud swaggers into the empty house, opens a can of beer, and slams down the shade on the kitchen door against the sunlight of the late afternoon.
Hud's producers have created a kind of New Wave western, using simple realism as their strongest tool. They evoke it with sounds: a transistor radio in de Wilde's shirt pocket twanging hillbilly anthems, the slamming of a screen door on a hot night, the screak-screak of the ice-cream freezer on the back porch, the relentless whistling of the wind scorching in off the plains, the brutal whump of the springs of the Cadillac as it guns across the railroad tracks. They also evoke it with the black-and-white camera of Old Master James Wong Howe: Dr. Pepper signs, juke joints, a greased-pig rodeo.
Despite its gimmicky title and selfconscious promotion campaign ("Why Hud?"), the film is on the level, and the four principal actors—Newman, Neal, Douglas, and de Wilde—are so good that they might well form the nucleus of a cinematic repertory company. The point of the picture is as dry and nihilistic as a Panhandle dust storm. Once, when Douglas is berating his son, de Wilde asks: "Why pick on Hud, Grandpa? Nearly everybody around town is like him."